Offshore Wind Predicitive Maintenance Project Kicks Off

The test site of the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) will be one of the scenarios for the development of a project to develop predictive maintenance in offshore wind farms.

The project, Operation & Maintenance tools integrating accurate structural health in offshore energy (WATEREYE), is expected to allow wind farm operators to accurately predict future needs for operations and maintenance to reduce costs, and increase the annual offshore wind energy production through accurate structural health monitoring and smart control of the offshore wind farms.

The project can lead to cost reductions of up to 30% of the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE), PLOCAN said.

The project partners are CEIT, project coordinator and leader of the work package which is in charge of smart sensors, communications and mobile platform; Delft Dynamics, who will develop a mobile platform (drone) for the data acquisition; and Semantic Web Company, who will monitor the date use, by optimising the acquisition, storage and access.

Furthermore, the following partners are involved in the project: TuDelft, which is the work package leader in charge of structural health monitor, diagnostic, prognostic and turbine control tools, and will develop and simulate load-limiting fault-tolerant control algorithms at wind tower; and Sintef Energy Research, who will lead the wind farm control and management as well as the integration of wind turbine control tools into wind farm management and will also lead the wind farm operation and maintenance validation. On the other side, Sintef industry will perform corrosion tests and develop the advanced corrosion models.

Flanders Make will contribute with the development of a 3D map of the wall thickness loss features and the development and validation of diagnosis, prognosis algorithms for wind turbine structure; Cobra will lead the definition of the use cases, requirements and system architecture and will contribute in the integration and validation of the developed tools and leading the exploitation plan; and PLOCAN will lead the integration and validation of the developed innovations in a real sea conditions site, the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, besides being the responsible of project communication and dissemination of the results.

WATEREYE is funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme.